Tag: Internal Access Control

Threat Stack, like many other Software-as-a-Service providers, has an on-call rotation. During any week, two members of our engineering organization are tasked with responding to alerts across the platform they build and maintain. These two engineers are also responsible for a myriad of other services as well that provide support to the infrastructure: services that provide metrics and monitoring, log capture and collection, authentication, etc.

This presents a security issue with regard to access control: should all staff have access to all servers all the time? In early start-up life this is unavoidable. But as an organization matures and grows, it becomes a bigger risk. Administrator and similarly scoped credential theft is a goldmine for attackers, so we wanted to improve our story around internal access control.

Unwrapping who needs access to what is always an evolving task, but we put in the work to figure out who goes where and why, and then created groups to control that access. Since we already use groups as a way to control who can log into specific machines, and we use PagerDuty to assign on-call rotations, it seemed like we could create a tool that would query PagerDuty and update our on-call group. So we did! And as a gift to you, we’ve open sourced it.